RealNetworks makes moving web videos to mobile phones easy

RealNetworks is trying to make it easy to transfer web videos to a mobile device with the latest version of its media player called RealPlayer SP (social and portable). The software, in beta starting today, allows you to easily move all kinds of non-DRM video, on to your smartphone without worrying about converting the video to the right format.

This is especially cool for downloading and transferring web videos to your phone. Yes, many smart phones have access to YouTube but there’s a whole lot of other videos that you can’t access directly from your phone, at least until Flash becomes widely available.

But if you just install the media player and browser plug in, you can download the video clips to your computer. You then just select what device you want to transfer it to and the software does the transcoding for you. You can’t do protected Hollywood stuff like Hulu or NBC.com but you can grab most content from CNN, YouTube, DailyMotion or any number of other sites.

The service will work with about 20-30 devices initially including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre and other smart phones. Transferring videos to the iPhone involves a two-step process of downloading the video to your hard drive and then converting it to an iTunes video that you can sync over.

The free product is available now at www.realplayer.com. A premium version with support for h.264 video conversion and DVD burning and playback capabilities will sell for $39.99.